


Pieces of Life

by Allothi



Category: Merlin (BBC)
Genre: F/F, Futurefic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-05
Updated: 2011-01-05
Packaged: 2017-10-14 10:48:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/148442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allothi/pseuds/Allothi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a kinkmeme prompt (<a href="http://community.livejournal.com/kinkme_merlin/5454.html?thread=2064718#t2064718">here</a>): "Arthur is dead and Gwen finds herself in a convent to atone for her sins. Morgana finds her and together they try to piece together a new life."</p><p>(Futurefic. Gen with shades of Gwen/Morgana. Mentions of past Gwen/Arthur and Gwen/Lancelot.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pieces of Life

**Author's Note:**

> I owe huge thanks to Mrinalinee for her patience and insight in discussing this at incredibly great length with me. Also, please note that this was mostly written in the hiatus between seasons two and three, and thus takes no account of season three.

It was never her gift to dream what was yet to be, but after all the long years in its presence, perhaps Gwen had picked up a little magic, because in the night as she slept, she heard Lancelot call out to her three times, to come to the place where he lay dying and see his body put to rest.

She knew, somehow, that she would not arrive while he still lived. Even so, as she reached the monastery where he had passed his final years, she felt a faint glimmering of hope at the thought that she was drawing near him. Within, the crowded monks parted to make a way through for her -- she was still recognised, even in her nun's garb -- but when she came to the body, laid out, around which they had clustered, at first it did not seem like Lancelot. It was too thin, too bony, the skin too slack about the face: it was too old a body to be his. Then she glimpsed Bors, stood a little way off and with smudgings of tears about the corners of his eyes, and she knew that it was Lancelot, and he was dead.

Later she went out to the lake by which the monastery had been built. She sat down beneath the shade of an apple tree, stared out across the waters and wondered if she, too, should weep. She wished that she had brought someone with her. In the first impulse of the morning, she had set off alone, barely sparing the time to saddle her horse. Now, she felt the lack of female company. There were several of her maids who had been loyal enough -- or fearful enough of the dark times now returning to Albion -- to follow her into the nunnery. Any of them, Gwen thought, might have followed her here, whatever protocol it was she might be breaking. Strange, she had once been such a peaceful, law-abiding creature. But she had grown lawless as her life progressed.

Many of the men here, of course, were known to her: monks with faces she had been more used to see at her banquet tables, feasting on meat, or encased like pictures within their silvery helms. It had seemed once as if Camelot had attained a kind of perfection -- some pure artistry in the collection of every kind of nobility and virtue, gathered about the round table Merlin had made for his king. Now Merlin and Arthur both lay somewhere across these waters, in some shadow realm, so men said, inaccessible to those they had left behind. Whether they were still living or dead, or something in between, no one could say. And the monks here, though they looked at Gwen with a kind of nostalgia in their eyes, looked, still, with a kind of blame as well. And Lancelot was dead.

"Desolate, isn't it?" The voice was familiar, but from so long ago it seemed like another dream. "So much for Arthur's dreams."

"If you say so." Gwen did not look up, but let her gaze stay, rested upon the play of colour upon the lake's surface, the blue-white glint of reflected light and the honey-golden smudge of the image of the sun.

"I did warn you," Morgana said. "Remember, I did offer to take you away."

Gwen remembered. "You did." Morgana had been so furious, so desperate, so certain in her dread of what was to come. There were better places, she had promised, better fates. "I suppose you found a better place."

" _Constantinople_ ," Morgana agreed. "Full of life. And art, and literature. No doom to speak of. Albion got quite faded to me. My dreams hardly seemed real."

"You made the right choice, then?" Gwen said, with a little suspicion in her breast.

"Well. Do you think yours was better?"

"You've come back in the end," Gwen pointed out, ignoring Morgana's question.

"All the tragedy's done with now," Morgana said. There was a kind of shrug in her voice. "It's all done."

"I'm still alive." Gwen ran her fingers through the grass, which grew thinly in the tree's shade, the soft soil visible beneath.

"I never said you wouldn't be."

*

Morgana's hair was still black, and she stood tall and well, like a young woman, one hand at the trunk of the tree. In the dappled light, her face seemed to alter as Gwen watched: as a field of ripe corn turns light and dark as the heads are bowed this way and that under a changing wind. At times, Morgana looked as bright and smooth-skinned as when Gwen had first met her. At times, her face seemed etched with deep lines.

"I've had a good life. Mostly," Gwen said.

"I've seen it, in parts," Morgana said.

"But you've missed most of it."

Morgana answered with a soft hum that seemed to acknowledge the truth of this.

"There's still quite a bit left, I expect," Gwen said. It had occurred to her that Morgana might be here to say a kind of last goodbye.

"I expect probably," Morgana said.

They lapsed into a heavy kind of silence as Gwen wondered how to reply.

"The knights think I should feel guilty," Gwen said eventually, as her mind came back to the day's events. She supposed it was sadness that made her so open. "I mean, the monks. The knights. Whatever they are now."

Thankfully, Morgana ignored the idea of guilt. She observed instead, "They look ready to pick up a sword at the first excuse. Actually, I think Meliant de Lis has one stuffed under his habit."

It felt strange to laugh. Gwen shook her head. "Lancelot thought, I suppose-- I think he thought that it would be better for them to be here. He really believed very strongly, by the end. The christ child, the three-in-one, the forgiveness, the forgiving, the whole of it. Maybe he had thought he could do more good praying than fighting." His great, warm heart had been so battered by the course of their lives. "I never asked him," Gwen admitted. "I don't know what he thought, for certain. We just agreed. I felt like I understood."

Morgana nodded slowly. "I dreamt of your abbey sometimes," she eventually said.

"Oh," said Gwen. She was confused that it was then that she finally began to cry.

*

Some time later, Bors came to offer food and to ask Gwen's intentions for the rest of the day and the coming night. From his way of speaking, it seemed that he assumed Morgana had come from the abbey with Gwen. He seemed uninterested by Morgana. Having never met her, of course, there was no way he could know who she was.

He said that something could easily be arranged if Gwen wished to rest a night before journeying home.

"Thank you," Gwen said. She thought of the men's eyes upon her. "But it's all right. It's already time that I should be back." People would be wondering where she had gone.

"Ah, your maj-- my lady." Bors drew together his thick brows.

Gwen remembered being a Queen. She sympathised with Bors' confusion.

"Please ready my horse," she said.

Bors glanced to Morgana, and then back at Gwen. She waited for him to say whatever he was trying to mean.

"Both of our horses," said Morgana, and Bors nodded in acknowledgement to Gwen.

*

They rode out with the sun high above them, down the same wide, straight road Gwen had followed that morning. She noticed now how neglected it looked: the little hedgerows that bordered the fields at either side were broken and trampled in places, and there were broken branches lying, jagged-edged, across the road. Its surface was barely more even than that of uncultivated land. The Kings of Cornwall had once kept all this region, which stretched towards Camelot itself, and maintained all the roads as if they were that which led up to the castle at Tintagel. Gwen remembered their boasts, and their castle overlooking the gleaming sea. She slowed, so that her horse could pick its way around what seemed the shattered remains of a small cart.

"It's like when I was a child," Morgana murmured.

Bors -- who had insisted Gwen needed an escort -- looked thoughtful. "So it was this bad once before," he said.

Gwen wondered if there was a way she could lose them both. And she watched Morgana's dun-coloured horse.

"You're not dressed like a nun," said Bors to Morgana.

"No," Morgana agreed.

"No, I thought not. Some kind of servant, then...?" said Bors.

" _No_ ," Morgana said.

"That's right," said Gwen. "She's my servant. Kate." She hoped, rather foolishly, that whatever Morgana looked like through Bors' eyes, she looked like a Kate. She considered telling him the truth. _This is the famed Morgana. No one knows this now, but I was once her maid. She went away. She came back. She went away again, when all our fates started to turn bad, and it felt like a betrayal when she asked me to go with her._ She felt a kind of relief in the thought that it was far too complicated and to true to really explain.

"She's new to servanthood," Gwen added. "She was born to something better."

Bors said something gallant about _the Lady Guinevere_ and _honour_ and _no higher position_. Morgana coldly suggested that they stop to eat. Gwen felt a mixture of hunger and light, childish guilt for her mischief. She agreed that they should eat.

*

At the abbey, Gwen settled back in as if she had never left. There were a few comprehending looks at the news of where she had been, but nothing more. Perhaps it helped that there were still nobles who were Gwen's friends, and who gave donations. Subtly and silently, she was protected. Gwen thought, at some point she must have learnt the unthinking reliance on this kind of protection that had, long ago, used to amaze her.

She embroidered. She gave alms. She oversaw the abbey's accounts, she settled little matters of organisation and minor disputes, and she mostly followed the rituals and observances of her position. She tried diligently to be a christian, since that was what life now seemed to require.

Morgana hung about the abbey like an incompletely domesticated cat. She would disappear for long stretches -- the first three, or four, or ten times, Gwen thought Morgana _had_ disappeared -- and then she would turn up unexpectedly underfoot. She had somehow now become _Anna, an old friend of Gwen's_ , and Gwen wondered whether this would cause problems if Bors should ever return for a visit, or whether it would somehow smooth itself over.

Morgana's horse stayed too, and seemed definitely real. Gwen visited it sometimes in the stables, on her own, and smoothed her hand over its flank, or placed her palm to feel the warm _huffs_ of its breath. In the manner of a young child who has got lost, separated from its parents in an unfamiliar place, and who is now too exhausted and overwhelmed to seek out a way back, Gwen would sometimes sit down in the hay and lay her face in her arms.

"You can't become a nun," she told Morgana, in the early hours of a morning, the two walking together out of the chapel, the sun still low in the sky.

"I'm sure I could," Morgana said, "somewhere."

"You can't stay here," Gwen said.

"The new religion suits me even worse than the old," Morgana agreed, and stayed.

*

Gwen could not clearly remember how it had felt, the first time Morgana came back to her. It had been more than three years after Uther had buried an empty coffin in a vault marked with Morgana's name. Gwen thought Arthur had been joyous, in a quiet, deep-feeling way, and that something strange and entirely human had shone in Merlin's eyes, but she felt no trust in her reconstruction. Uther himself had by then received a similar and nearby empty tomb, although for somewhat different reasons.

Gwen could remember what had followed in patches. She remembered Arthur sending for the leaders of the druids, with Morgana close to his side. And then there had been the arrival of Morgause and Mordred, and Merlin's antipathy, and the locked-up days of negotiation, resulting in a treaty each side would go on to break.

More tangibly, Gwen remembered Morgana bent over sheets of parchment at empty, nighttime hours, sketching maps and blocks of troops with a scratchy pen, ink on her fingers and where she'd touched her face. Morgana had had an anxious, fiery energy about her that had more usually seemed missing in the years of her return.

"You don't have to sit with me," Morgana had sometimes said.

"It's like old times," Gwen replied.

"I don't believe you miss being a maid."

And no, Gwen hadn't, but she had sometimes missed the smallness of her old concerns. Her little budget, her work, her friends. Her little unsuspecting worries over how badly Morgana often slept. Now, so many years later again and with a new set of old concerns to look back upon, she sometimes missed those new-old concerns' largeness. It was sometimes hard for her to believe in the meaning of the small good works she here, tucked away in her abbey. She had never found herself able to calculate whether she really had much to make amends for, but the thought that she might sometimes hung at the back of her head and made her feel that she owed something far greater than she was giving.

When she had first come here, she had thought of Lancelot often, as a source of comfort. Now, she thought of him very little, because to do so had become painful. Instead, she was occasionally possessed by a weird energy, deep in the night, that sent her out wandering the abbey grounds, pressing her hands into the earth and whispering to it that all this land had once been hers, and she its. She had helped to build something here -- something of greatness -- and it surely lived on, somehow, somewhere beneath the soil.

*

"Why come back now?" Gwen asked Morgana. It was perhaps two months after Morgana had arrived. They were seated in the abbey gardens, and the dry, autumn scents of the herb bushes were on the air. "Did you really think that _now_ , I would have no bonds left to this place -- that I'd run off with you?"

Morgana shook her head and looked away into the distance. "I wanted to come back," she said. "This is still my homeland."

"It's too late," Gwen said. She thought about the softened, settled tones of Morgana's voice, and remembered that same voice speaking quicker, pulled taut. In Gwen's memories, Morgana always had something to prove, or something to prophesy. Or something to flee. Gwen remembered one day in the height of Camelot's power, the summer sun dazzling and hot through Gwen's window, the thick castle stone still cold. Morgana had been dressed, as ever, for magnetism and striking grace. But though her hands and face were washed clean and her face made up, there had been one small spot of ink on her sleeve. She had carried a sheaf of papers and thrown them across Gwen's large and tidy bed. Gwen could not recall what those papers had been.

Morgana had reeled off the future as though it were unchangeable as history. _One year from now. Two years from now. Three months after that. Five years from now. Nine years from now. Eleven or twelve years from now, and then a few months or weeks after that. And then, when all that is done--_

"You became such a fatalist," Gwen said.

"No, not a fatalist exactly." Morgana sounded as though she had thought this through too many times to think about it again. "I could believe in my own mind. Or I could believe I was insane." She moved her head in a slight, expressive way. "I'm definitely sane," she said.

"But that's..." Gwen struggled for a way to explain how she knew that reality could not have been so simple. "There must have been other choices."

"And being a Seer isn't the same as having a set of predictions handed to you every morning," Morgana continued. She managed to seem somewhere between acknowledging and ignoring what Gwen had said. "There's something terrible about being part of events you've already foreseen. Even small ones. The way you understand things, the way you think about what's happening, the way you feel things... I've never found a good way to explain it."

"You only want to tell me I don't know enough to disagree with you," Gwen told her.

Morgana opened her mouth as if to speak, paused, and did not. She closed her eyes and appeared to retreat into her own thoughts.

"You must have built something for yourself, in all this time," Gwen said. "A new place in the world. A family."

"No..." Morgana roused herself. "Yes, in a way."

"You have a place where you belong," Gwen told her gently.

"I think so. In a way, I've never really left Albion."

*

Raiders arrived from the sea, and set up camp on the southern coast. For five days, they killed, robbed, and pillaged. They did not come as far north as the abbey -- and Gwen liked to hope that even foreigners and thieves would have a practical, godfearing respect for any holy places they might encounter -- but the damage they did was extensive. The numbers of dead or captured were high. So too were the numbers of wounded. The agricultural land had been left mostly intact, but that only made Gwen worry that the raiders must intend to return.

Many of the injured needed care beyond what their near neighbours could provide; many families had been left without supplies for the oncoming winter; some had been left homeless; some children were now orphans. Gwen took to the business of aid with a new energy and fear, allowing her more complicated, personal worries to sink into the quieter parts of her mind. As the late-autumn storms began to rage, she travelled widely. They needed support, both financial and practical, from the local landowners and nobility; and Gwen wanted these men to know what destruction had taken place at their own back doors, to see it for themselves and to comprehend the full extent of the danger.

There were some to whom it was more politic to send one of the others of the nuns. In many cases, however, Gwen judged that she herself would carry most weight. She found that she was often even more influential than she had expected. The many scandals of the last years of her and Arthur's reign seemed to have faded in strength -- becoming inconsequential in the minds of men grown nostalgic for better days. Her years of religious life were taken as a kind of atonement. Her new status seemed to vouch for her. She thought she had never felt less called upon to prove herself at any time in her life.

She also began to realise, for the first time, that she was old. So much travelling wore on her. Her bones ached constantly, and the damp seemed to seep beneath her skin so that her chest felt cold as snow, and for hours after she had got warm and dry she would still be suppressing shivers. She developed a set of stabbing pains in her back that would come on at all times and would remain with her no matter what position she sat, stood or lay in. She slept poorly and eventually, unsurprisingly, she became badly ill. She was at the mansion house of a minor duke at the time, and she remained there and was nursed back to health over the winter.

By this point, Gwen had barely seen Morgana for some time. Morgana had seemed increasingly shaken as the news began to arrive and their picture of what was happening became more and more detailed. Having become something of a settled fixture at the abbey, even having built up a kind of rapport with some of the nuns, she now resumed her longer absences, spoke little, and often seemed not to hear when she was spoken to. When Gwen first set off to see the damage for herself, Morgana went with her, and walked slowly about the first of the ravaged villages, her attention fixing on strange details.

Gwen had registered but not reflected on Morgana's strange behaviour. She now wondered whether Morgana had foreseen any of what had occurred. At the time, Gwen had thought not. Morgana had seemed anything but forewarned. And the raids seemed too disordered in their violence, too far removed from the strict purpose and meaning Morgana's visions had always seemed to impose upon events. Too desolating.

When Morgana slipped away yet again, not long after that day in the village, it had seemed fitting: in keeping with the new reordering of Gwen's life. But in a still, snowy January, with time on her hands and still mostly bed-bound, Gwen thought to miss Morgana. She wanted her if only because Gwen had realised that no one else could understand quite how furious she was that at the onset of trouble, Morgana had run away, yet again.

*

"It's been the same all round the coast. They say it was worst in the north-east -- I didn't get that far. Oh. And I brought you some flowers," Morgana added.

Gwen raised herself up slowly in bed, and propped herself back against the headboard with a pillow. Morgana was holding out a small, stubby bunch of snowdrops. Gwen sighed, head aching and heavy.

"There's a small vase on the dresser," she said, her mind fixing on the most practical business first. "And there should be a pitcher of water."

Morgana went and set about arranging the flowers. "This feels like it should be the other way around."

"I always picked the flowers myself," Gwen said.

Morgana was still for a moment. With her back to Gwen, she seemed more mortal: her head slightly bent, her hair for once fastened unshowily, in a stiff, tight bun. Her clothes were plain -- they had been on the day of Lancelot's funeral, and ever since -- though they were _nicely_ plain. She set the flowers on a table and stood back, admiring the effect.

Gwen said, "When you were fifteen you said you hated cowards."

"And then I became one." Morgana spoke lightly, as if the admission could deflect its own truth.

"Yes. You did."

*

"You came by boat," Gwen said, later. She was piecing old thoughts together. "You knew when to come -- the right date -- and maybe which boat to get on, but it was just a boat. The boat sailed to Albion. Put in at a harbour. You bought that horse, rode to the monastery, and arrived a little time after I did. You told them I'd-- gone on ahead. It would have been believable."

"Actually, I stole the horse," said Morgana.

"And you walked out as if by magic, and your appearance is -- my head hurts if I even try to look properly at your face -- and you can still confuse people a little, you still have power--"

Morgana shrugged.

"--but you're all show," Gwen said. "And then you _run_. And why can't you just look like-- like whatever looking like _yourself_ should be."

"Oh, I think I lost track of what that would be," Morgana said. But smoothed a hand over her features, and they settled into something early middle-aged.

"Older than that," Gwen told her.

"Oh," said Morgana, her appearance mutable once more.

*

When Gwen was twelve years old, her father took her to the druids. It was not what everyone did, but it was still, Gwen had known from hushed whispers here and there, what a number of their neighbours had done when their own children had turned twelve or thirteen. They respected King Uther's laws, and feared the point of the sword at which those laws were enforced. But, they had reasoned, even if the Old Religion did not come back into power in their own lives, no royal law would follow them into the land of the dead. And so Gwen was taken to the druids, to have her future read and a few small protections placed upon her soul.

She and her father had come to the clearing -- weary with walking the rough ground of the forest -- and had seen nothing. Only the open grass. And then, slowly, the encampment had begun to fade into view: tents nestling into the scenery; a few strong, quiet fires; rows of tools; clothing in rough shades of brown and grey, hung out to dry and wavering in the light wind; and, finally, the busy forms of the druids themselves.

As Queen, Gwen had presided over the slow emergence of these people from their hiding. She had seen magic itself seem to grow in strength and vigour, to fill the land and become part of its shape. Dangerous, but vital, necessary in an undeniable, unalterable way.

And now-- Three years ago, a wanderer had come to the abbey, peddling tiny, carved figures that had been enchanted to change their shapes in the changing light. A hedgehog that curled into a spiny ball at night and unfurled itself by stages in the onset of day. A caterpillar that grew wings and became a moth. Gwen had had to send the man away -- such objects were incompatible with the new faith -- but she had slipped him a golden coin and folded the caterpillar-moth into her sleeve. She concealed it in a locked box in her room. The third time she took it out, in the grey of dusk, the magic had died away and the figure was stuck, unchanging, in the shape of a moth.

Since then, there had been only Morgana.

Gwen called a maid to help her dress, and then asked the girl to help her down to the stables. Morgana's dun-coloured horse was there with the rest -- perhaps looking a little more worn than when Gwen had last seen it, a season ago. Gwen sat down in the hay and watched its small movements, and listened to its breath. The maid frowned at her.

*

Morgana brought her a sheaf of maps. The inked lines were smoother than Gwen felt Morgana's penmanship ought to be. On the largest of the maps -- the most important one -- the land was crossed with what seemed like hundreds of borderlines. Albion was shown divided into tiny, contiguous shapes, like a dropped plate crossed with fractures that may hold or may shatter completely, the varnished fragments falling here and there.

Sections of the coast were neatly cross-hatched. Other places were marked and labelled in the elegant script that had been taught at Uther's court. Morgana had drawn in several castles -- the castle at Camelot was marked with disproportionate circular rubble in the place of one of its towers. The sea was rendered with clusters of waves and a single ship, looking brave and romantic, its sails swollen; and in the upper-right corner, in contradiction with the map itself, was the coat of arms that had been the emblem of Gwen and Arthur's reign.

The rest of the maps were of smaller areas, in closer detail. Most were of those areas of coast that had suffered the most serious attacks; others were of regions Morgana judged were most at risk or might be otherwise significant; a few were of areas where foreigners had settled, some long ago, and now lived in established communities. Gwen studied them. Her attention returned constantly to the largest: she needed to take it in over and over again.

"How far did you go yourself?" Gwen asked. "And then, how much do you know by first-hand report? And what's left, after that?"

Morgana showed her, and then wrote it down and described something of how she'd come by her information. Most seemed fairly reliable.

Gwen looked at the map. She kept mis-seeing the lines in red instead of black -- the red that appears before closed eyes when the light is strong. The map seemed as perfect, as eerily confident, as any Morgana had ever produced.

"You draw better than ever," Gwen said.

Morgana thanked her.

"And--"

"My mind is blank," Morgana said.

Gwen frowned and pressed a hand to her own brow. "Oh," she said. "I-- yes. I feel it too. I feel so powerless."

"No," Morgana said, "I-- I've dreamed of Albion all my life. Wherever I was, I've been _fixed_ here, whatever-- it was like a more real reality, the most real thing in my mind. It was painful, horrible, sometimes, but I've never not known--" She grimaced. There was a second where her face seemed entirely composed of dark, carvernous lines.

" _Oh_ ," said Gwen. And it was an old and well-trained instinct to always comfort Morgana: she wrapped her arm about Morgana's shoulders.

"I saw you setting off, that day, two months before," Morgana said. "But something snapped."

*

They returned to the abbey in March, proceeding along the northern line of the Cornish coast at a slow pace. The sea looked painted in the damp spring light, waves breaking low and spreading to cover the sands thinly, only to draw back and break again. Gwen tried to understand which points would make good natural harbours, with the help of their escort -- a handful of battle-minded young men whom she wanted to think of as knights.

"I can think of four options," Gwen told Morgana, on about their third break -- fed and seated almost-comfortably on someone else's cloak, as the men progressed with their heavier midday meal.

Morgana offered up, "One, we do nothing. We wait."

"Five options," Gwen said.

"Two, then. Of five." Morgana lent back. "We fight. _We_ don't though -- we'd have to get a lot of kings around a table. And make them agree."

Gwen shook her head slowly. "Besides," she said. "Fight with what? Our wealth is gone. Most fighting men are dead, or injured, or young and inexperienced." She stared off towards the shadows of the Welsh coast. "And this isn't an invading army, it's-- border security. A standing force, systems of communication, probably new fortifications and watch-towers."

"A lot to agree upon."

"And to pay for." As Queen, Gwen had tended to manage the accounts of the kingdom. Arthur never seemed to fully understand that money had its limits. Left to himself, he overspent -- not on personal luxuries, but because he had had a kind of innate aversion to prioritising one thing over another. He disliked the idea that not every problem could be solved at once: that some must come first.

"How much did you leave out?" Gwen asked, because she had always wondered.

"--the maps?" Morgana said, in clear confusion.

"No. Back then. Decades ago." It was hard to know how to feel or talk about what mattered so immensely. "How much did you leave out, when you told me what was coming?"

Morgana paused before she answered, "Nothing important."

"Would it have made a difference, if I had gone with you?"

"No," said Morgana, as if effortlessly certain.

*

"Three," said Morgana, as they walked into the abbey. Gwen had never realised how familiar it had become to her. She marvelled at the colour of the stone, the size and significant look of the place, the line it made at its height against the sky. She imagined that the air had a different quality.

"Three," Morgana said. "We try to bargain with them. Or with someone else who can protect us."

"We have nothing to offer but Albion itself," said Gwen.

Morgana nodded. "Four," she said softly. "We leave Albion."

"I won't do that," said Gwen.

"No. All right."

"You could," said Gwen.

Morgana loosed her hair from its knot. As it spilled over her shoulders, it changed in colour from black to a varying grey and white, from roots to tips at once. The effect was as though what was real was simply adjusting itself. Morgana twisted a few strands between her fingers.

"You could," Gwen told her.

"I went to my father's grave," Morgana said. "And my mother's. And I went to see my tomb." She held up a lock of hair to inspect; something odd happened about the confusion of her face, and she began pushing all her hair behind her shoulders. They were nearing Gwen's chamber now -- a young nun hurried past them. Gwen wondered if the girl could see the change, or know it as one, and if she could, what she might think of it.

"It was interesting," Morgana said. "It was on my way," she added.

"Are you thinking about leaving?" said Gwen.

"Yes," Morgana said. "Not as something I'll do."

*

"Five." Gwen's things had already been brought up to her chamber. She sighed over the small collection of bundles. "Five." She sighed again. "Did we pack the maps with your things or with mine?"

Morgana was looking about her, at Gwen's things and Gwen's books on the bookcase. "I didn't pack for myself."

Of course not. Morgana had probably never packed for herself in her life. Gwen wondered whether it was better or worse that it was some time since she had, either.

"They're probably with your things," Gwen said. She touched the wood of her desk for the first time in months. On impulse, she opened a drawer and took out a small, wooden box from near the back. She unlocked it and touched her fingers to the wooden figure of a moth that lay neatly settled upon the soft, folded cloth within. She lifted it up and held it in the pale evening light shining in through the window. She watched it for any signs of change.

"You have a lot of histories," said Morgana, looking at the books again. Gwen supposed, when she thought about it, that she had never let Morgana into her room before now.

"They tend to get nicer binding," Gwen said.

*

She had never arranged for Morgana to have a room of her own at the abbey, but had been peripherally aware that a room had been arranged. Or had perhaps arrived, Gwen had sometimes speculated, out of the shadows somewhere, specifically for Morgana's use. She realised as Morgana opened the door that she had somehow become convinced of something rather splendid. Samite and jewels and some strange ethereal light. But Morgana's chamber was ordinary. Small, somewhat bare and rather dusty -- neglected in Morgana's long absence. In main, it was like an ordinary nun's room. Gwen wanted to check under the bed for arcane objects, and felt embarrassed, as if Morgana could know what was on her mind.

The maps _were_ there, at least. Rolled tightly in a leather case well-suited to the purpose. Gwen thought of how well she had been treated, and how little she might be able to do for her hosts. She sat down on the bed and spread the map of Albion along it, and tried to remember old places, old times. Encampment places; routes and roads and forest paths; a set of caves; a sheltered place in a deep, hidden valley; an island on a vast lake; a crumbling castle; a forest clearing, long, long ago. She tried to understand how things would have been altered by all the changes laid out so neatly in Morgana's penwork. Gwen had lived in this land all her life, had ruled it, had lived through its wars, and at the time she stepped down from her position as Queen, perhaps there had been no one who had known Albion as well as she had -- or if anyone had, it had been and still was Morgana.

They began to discuss their memories. And as they spoke, their recollections seemed to grow, so fast that Gwen felt as if she now suddenly knew more than she ever had done before, as if she had found a way to access knowledge at its source; or as if understanding were flowing into her from the land itself.

Morgana traced outlines with her fingers sweeping along the surface of the wall. She listened and spoke, and Gwen watched Morgana's hands and tried to see what Morgana could see. Morgana breathed heavily in the space of a pause.

"I think--" Gwen felt let down. "I think that's mostly it. I suppose."

"I think so." Morgana sat down in her chair and lent back, tilted her chin and looked again at the space of wall she had drawn upon -- still empty. Her hair was still grey, and was pressed between her body and the back of the chair, so that it bulged out to the right in one large, misshapen wave by her neck. She extended one arm and, artistically, her fingers. She breathed more deeply again, and she whispered something that lit a faint glow in her irises. The shape of Albion glowed to life upon the wall for a single moment, both something like a map and something like a real, god's view from somewhere far above. It was already vanishing by the time Gwen understood what it was: the colours seeming to seep into the abbey stone just as the first rainwater seeps into the parched summer soil and disappears, as though it was never there.

"All right," said Morgana, lowering her arm and bending her head, eyes closing. "Okay." She shook her head and turned to the window. The sky was impressively dark and littered with stars. Gwen couldn't even remember lighting a candle, though three were burning, each at a different length.

"I'll draw it tomorrow," Morgana said.

Gwen left reluctantly. It was like being seventeen again, staying up into the night, talking incessantly, entirely absorbed in Morgana's company: finally slipping off far too late, back to her father's house, feeling that she was no longer herself, just the one of her, hurrying in the night.

The main differences, Gwen reflected, were in speed and in her new aches. She walked sedately, her candle barely flickering. In her own chamber she set it down and took the time, for once, to study her face in the mirror. She touched her grey hair, cropped close to her head, and with her eyes she followed the lines of her wrinkles. She thought of the way she had watched herself alter, year by year. She blew out her candle and tried to make her mind quiet enough for her to sleep.

*

Gwen restlessly reacquainted herself with the abbey, going over its grounds and up and down the cloisters, watching the sky and refitting herself only partially, uncomfortably, to the monastic day. She wondered whether it wouldn't be better if she let religion go. She thought of how saddened and puzzled Lancelot would have been to hear that thought. What he would have felt still mattered to her, but disconnectedly, nostalgia softening her sense of pain.

Morgana finished her work late on in the following morning. The map was large and complexly rendered. Gwen looked over it and reconsidered what it showed.

"I think, the far north..." she touched a few places. But it was more that there was a general, _northwards_ feeling to the map. She remembered encountering a group of druids on the road. They had looked ordinary, mundanely shabby, sat tiredly on the grass or in their wagons amongst the bundles of their possessions, whilst a few of their number worked to fix the broken wheel that had brought them to a temporary halt. They had seemed to Gwen to take care not to show any interest in the sight of the royal party passing them by.

She felt that she understood, at least in part, how it was that whilst some had gladly flooded back into the cities and castles, the political centres of Albion's world, many of the less powerful magic users had kept to their newer, itinerant, more separate way of life. Who knew when the wind might change and the killing start over again?

Morgana, who probably knew the map by heart, was looking out of the window. "It would be a lot of travelling," she said.

Gwen knew it would. "I suppose a nice, comfortable carriage would be too attractive to bandits."

"And break down the moment we left the good roads."

"And require good stables with helpful, generous lords at convenient intervals." Gwen smiled a little wistfully. "And I don't think I'm up for any more adventuring on horseback."

"Not across the length and breadth of Albion," agreed Morgana.

"They may have left. Or they may not help us, or even be able to help."

"I know." Morgana turned her face towards Gwen's own. "We'll find out, then."

*

They made copies of the map. Gwen wrote letters, soliciting funds, assistance and, in a few cases, information. So did Morgana, interestingly, although she refused to say to whom, and paid her messengers enough -- or made enough of an impression on them -- that they would tell nothing to Gwen. Gwen also sent for a few would-be knights she had come upon over the winter, and a few impressive young women, and, after some thought, she also called up a few villagers from the lands around the abbey. She gave them two maps and their instructions, kitted them out with provisions and what seemed like far too few gold coins, and sent them off one morning towards the very end of March, the first of what she hoped would be five or six such bands. They looked rather unspectacular, like a group of adolescents off on a picnic.

"When we were their age, we looked more impressive than that," said Morgana.

" _You_ did," said Gwen.

*

She stayed on at the abbey. She was a useful figurehead, and she was fond of the place, and if she felt the occasional pang of guilt when she saw the nuns filing into the chapel, well, she was used to such pangs. Short of desecrating the altars, she seemed tacitly allowed to do as she liked. She tactfully steered clear of much discussion of her plans, which might have made this arrangement more awkward. She found that she became a little isolated; but she was busy and she was useful, and there was always Morgana.

Bors visited the abbey. News of the raids and of Gwen's illness had at last reached the secluded place where Lancelot had spent the last years of his life, and Bors, with outdated, knightly spirit, had come because it had seemed to him that he must come, and must find something he could do.

"Or if not," he said, and looked troubled. "If not, I'm thinking of going on a pilgrimage. I need something, some way... I need to know my place in the world."

Gwen understood. He was young compared to her, perhaps fifteen years younger: he had not been raised for stillness and had not lived through enough to have learnt to accommodate it. He readily accepted when she asked him to take a part in her search, and set off again within a few days to gather together old comrades he thought would be equally willing.

He had come upon Morgana only a few hours into his stay. He and Gwen had been walking together in the gardens, Gwen still weighing up what she wanted to ask of him, when they passed Morgana, meandering, slow, as if half asleep, in the other direction. Gwen saw Bors' eye catch upon Morgana's face, and his brow furrow. Gwen, too, watched Morgana, trying to see one old friend's face through the eyes of another. She found she could not recall when it was that Morgana had allowed her features to rest, aged and consistent.

"Ah," Bors said, as Morgana turned a corner and was lost from view. "She's your servant! Of course, I remember."

"Mm," Gwen said, and racked her brains for the name she had called Morgana that day. She gave up. "Actually, I don't think she's ever served anyone in the whole of her life."

"Oh," said Bors. "So..."

"She's like me. She's a sort of exile."

*

Gwen had been born in April, and had not celebrated her birthday either before she became Queen or since the day she had left Arthur. She remembered being told it was her birthday, and smiled upon, by her father, every year until his death; then royal celebrations, the difficult management of which had always fallen to Gwen's own care; and after that, it had been a relief to let go. And so it came around this year, and if anyone remembered, no one said anything; and Gwen took a few quiet moments in the morning to remember her father's voice.

The abbey had only a rather stubby tower. Gwen might not have been able to climb the stairs if it had been much taller. She put her hands upon the stone, and her imagination came alive with images of the high, long ramparts at the castle at Camelot. Looking out across the land, she wondered quite how mad she must be to still feel as though all Albion was a little bit her own.

She did not hear Morgana's feet upon the steps, and did not know how long Morgana might have been there before Gwen turned to take in the opposite view, and saw her. The two of them said very little for some time, but looked out together. Gwen supposed it was in both of their minds that it might not be long, now, until another raid. They had seen off another search party -- their third -- a few mornings previously, and had also recently had word from the first: they were on course, and had as yet encountered no serious dangers. Gwen knew it would be a long time yet until she was likely to hear anything more substantial. In the meantime, they could only brace themselves. At least the local leaders seemed to be cooperating: doing what they could to prepare for the worst.

"I should never have left," Morgana said. She sounded tired, but not heavily distressed. She almost sounded peaceful.

Gwen's own mind had run over and over thoughts and words like that -- _I should have; I should never have_. She thought, it was not that her regrets had lost their power. It was only that she had found a way to live alongside them.

"Let's go down," she said. "Things to do."

In the evening, she went to her room and found that her wooden moth had been lain out on the table, removed from Gwen's box, although the only key was still on its chain around her neck. At first, she thought the moth had been broken. And then she saw that it was in its old shape of a caterpillar, which altered with the darkening of the light, until finally it unfurled new wings.


End file.
